9 of the Best Compact Multi-Drive Pedals

I admittedly came to this one quite late and acquired it after I had received my larger more full-featured BYOC Crown Jewel - that comes though with LED and Silicon soft-clipping and Silicon and Germanium hard-clipping - so I really wanted the Mosfet flavour from the BYOC Overdrive 2 to complement that. The fact that this pedal comes with a second independently footswtichable Boost makes it all the more worthwhile for me - as dual-footswitch compact pedals are my favourite format / form-factor of pedal. So besides the Silicon and Mosfet clipping options here we also have a 3-way tone shift toggle for Full, Normal and Fat EQ profiles - where Normal is your kind of classic mid-boosted Tube Screamer style curve, the Full is a more even boost curve across all frequencies, and the Fat has enhanced low-end frequencies. This is a really neat and versatile overdrive if you can get your hands on it.

If I could have only one on this page - this would most definitely be that choice, as borne out by the fact that this pedal has been a permanent fixture of my pedal-chain pretty much since its launch. You get dual channels / essentially two sides to the pedal with a JFET circuit on the left / A side and an Integrated circuit on the right / B side. You can select between Boost, Drive and Fuzz voicing on each Channel - and play them individually or in combination - either parallel or series in either direction. In mixing these different flavours together you get a really broad range of tones - and can further adjust gain via internal trim-pots. This one takes a little while to get used to, but a little patience can yield amazing results - and it's so versatile - while I actually use it mostly as a type of Fuzz or Fuzzy-Drive even! Note that you also have 2 onboard presets available here courtesy of Chase Bliss's usual digital control layer - while the circuit and signal path is wholly analog as usual.

I've only relatively recently started rotating pedals in The Elements slot, as it was unassailable and pretty much permanent for a couple of years, but I have so many different interesting flavours now - that this now gets occasionally rotated out of the chain. When playing on the higher gain stage you really do need a Noise Gate as there is a quite discernible noise floor - which is one of the things I guess which makes this pedal so dynamically lively and amp-like. I get some wonderful tones out of this pedal - but without the noise gate at higher gain levels it can generate a lot of unwanted hiss. Fantastically versatile pedal and with a really great sound - but obviously with provisos attached - you need to know how to deploy this one.

This is another pedal that takes a while to get used to. I myself typically prefer the more classic 3-band EQ - but here you have a gain Tone Dial alongside 2-Band Pre- or Post- EQ. You also have 3 clipping options and 3 multiplier options - and depending on where you place the EQ versus the Gain - can achieve some really cool fuzzy tones as well as crisp crunchy drive and dynamic distortion. I initially did not know where to place this pedal, but found I could very easily dial in OCD sounds here and much more besides - so this kind of ousted the Fulltone OCD as that category's pedal of choice. This pedal is another Tweaker's delight - and most will take a while to get to grips with the full range on offer.

I've had this pedal on the radar for a while, but only hit the trigger last month actually. I previously had Side Effects' excellent Woolly Mammoth 7 Fuzz Clone, but the intention was always to get this pedal too - which has a 3-way voicing dial - taking you up the gears from Boost / Low Gain Overdrive through to Crunch and onto Distortion. You have the full 3-band EQ here alongside Level and Gain - with a huge range of all parameters on-tap. This pedal is very straightforward to use and you can dial in excellent tones quickly and easily.

I've only just sprung for one of these - they have only recently been made availableon Reverb.com and are a replacement / update for the Sinvertek No.5 Distortion which I already have. Judging by the demos they've applied slightly softer clipping to extend the range into a smoother low-gain overdrive - while still retaining the full-dynamic-range distortion at the top-end of the gain. What makes this pedal really clever are the boost modes - where you can add either Volume or Gain Boost or both by stomping on the footswitch a second time - so that if those options are selected - one press is one, second press is add boost, and two quick presses is off - or you can cycle between boost/s on and off. In addition to that super smart functionality you have a sort of 4-band EQ - with added Presence, and 3-way selector for Presence / High Frequency EQ Profile, as well as Mid-Frequency EQ profile. This pedal is fully analog signal path, but does apply a digital control layer much like Chase Bliss Audio does.

As with every multi-voice pedal of this ilk you will find some of these voicings to your liking and others slightly less so. Overall this is probably the easiest one to understand here - you have simply 11 clearly identified voicings - accompanied by the very typical Volume, Tone and Gain dials - it's kind of like a subset of my 12 Degrees of Saturation with some more obvious classic voicings here and others less distinct. Generally works well in the middle of the pack, while for me is somewhat less successful at the two extremes of the saturation curve in terms of timbre/texture/harmonics. This is though an entirely analog pedal which achieves its tone by smart component switching - using different diodes, clipping, resistors etc. It is very fairly priced for what it is, but I don't feel it would ever replace the other pedals I have for each of its 11 equivalent voicing flavours. The Tone control is pretty good, not near the dynamic range of my Decibelics Golden Horse though - and part of me would always prefer to see 3-band EQ!

This is the newest / most recently released of these pedals and cleverly does away with the use of Caps / Capacitors within the main gain circuit for supposedly more vibrancy and harmonics. It is billed to delivery the combined tones of the Timmy, Blues Breaker and King of Tone pedals - and does this via 5 controls plus a 9V/18V headroom toggle. The 5 controls are Volume, Gain, Mood (Tone), High (Presence), while there are 6 voicing options - BS Boost, OD1 Smooth Overdrive, OD2 Creamy Overdrive, DS1 Natural Amp Distortion, DS2 Amp Distortion with Bite and OD1+DS2. I've kind of already decided that I will add this one when the time is right as it kind of fits into the profile of pedals I like, and I've been impressed by the early demos - won't be a priority, but may well be landed before year-end.

There's no doubt a few I've inadvertently overlooked or left out, alongside a at least a couple that I've yet to fully make my mind up about. The first of these is last year's GFI System Jonassus (£199) - a two channel / dual-footswitch pedal with 3 different clipping modes on each side - so similar to the Brothers in some vague respect, but for me it is let down by only having a single tone control - which is shared by both sides! This one thing really puts me of this pedal - to the tune that it's not made the collection. I feel GFI could easily remedy this with a V2 version of the pedal which as one more dial - to allow you to adjust tonality independently on each Channel - something that I would have though essential...

I also have another new NAMM pedal under consideration - the Neunaber Neuron Gain Intelligence PreAmp, Compressor, Noise Gate & Cab Simulator (£299) which mixes up analog and digital processing. Most importantly it has presets onboard - which most of the above pedals are somewhat conspicuously missing. Yet for some reason I still haven't been totally won over by this pedal - although I am somewhat warming up to it. I have seen a number of demos now, but for whatever reason there's something niggling me at the back of my mind and subconsciously indicating that this may not be something for me. However I remain open-minded and it could well be that something pulls me over the line in the end.